California nebula Help Please

[astrosathya]

Hello Everyone,

This is my 1st attempt at Ha RGB image combination. The following image is about 2hr 55m Ha data and 20m each of RGB taken from Red Zone Bortle 7/8 sky. I am having trouble keeping the colours looking good. The 1st image is unprocessed combined image from Pixinsight Pixelmath. The 2nd image is after several adjustments in Photoshop. Any help will be highly appreciated.

 

[spillage]

Thats a good start. I would make sure that you use calibration files when stacking as this should take out the banding and dust motes you have. This will then make it easier to process the image. I think you need to crop the image in pi and then run dbe? sorry I do not really know my way around PI even though I have a copy.

 

cheers

[tomato]

Firstly, total respect to you  for imaging this object under a Bortle 7/8 sky! I agree 100% that the application of Calibration frames (darks/flats/bias) will make a tremendous difference  to this image, making further processing much easier.

[astrosathya]

13 hours ago, tomato said:

Firstly, total respect to you  for imaging this object under a Bortle 7/8 sky! I agree 100% that the application of Calibration frames (darks/flats/bias) will make a tremendous difference  to this image, making further processing much easier.

Thank You for the kind words. Access to dark skies outside of Bangalore City requires a drive of approx 120-150km, in traffic etc. That was the very reason I purchased the QHY9 Mono camera with Baader filters. Even then, I still have to climb 2 floors with all my equipment to the roof of my 5 floor apartment anf then image.  It takes a lot of self motivation, but the efforts are worth it. I imaged Rosette a week before california. It came out much better. Image is a composite of 2.5hrs Ha and 1h 55m of OIII.